Recently, Theo de Raadt and the other engineers who oversee the OpenBSD operating system were hit with a $20,000 bill for the electricity that feeds the computers on which they test this venerable piece of software. fter they revealed that the bill could bring the project down, Mircea Popescu, the Romanian who runs the online bitcoin exchange MPEx, stepped in to save them.
It’s another example of how the bitcoin community is working to boost the fortunes of the wider world of open source software. The software that drives bitcoin across a worldwide network of machines also is open source, and because this code shares new currency with those who help run it, the project has created a new class of very rich computer geeks. We call them the bitcoin nouveau riche, and many are sharing their money with their open source brethren.